Broken Law (Updated)

So, a year after promising a reply to my detailed critique of his “evil god challenge,” Stephen Law’s long-awaited response (see the combox remarks he links to) mostly comes to this: You just don’t get it.  Go re-read my paper and this article by Wes Morriston.

“Courtier’s reply,” anyone?

Though he dismisses them as “awful,” Law does not respond in any substantive way to the points I made in my critique.  He does offer a few brief remarks intended to clarify his position, but they serve only to reinforce, rather than answer, my objections.  I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said before -- if you haven’t already, go read my original post on Law (since which I’ve written a few other relevant posts, which I’ve linked to here).  But you might recall that the problem with Law’s position is as follows.

Reading Rosenberg, Part III

Continuing our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we come to Rosenberg’s treatment of the question “Where did the big bang come from?”  As serious students of the cosmological argument for the existence of God are aware, most of its defenders historically (including key figures like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz) are not arguing for a temporal first cause of the world.  Their claim is not that God must have caused the world to begin (though some of them believe that He did, for independent reasons) but rather that He must continually be sustaining the world in existence, and would have to be doing so even if the universe had no beginning.  But there is a version of the cosmological argument that does argue for a temporal first cause of the world, namely the kalām cosmological argument.  Rosenberg does not explicitly address any specific version of either argument, but he is, in effect, trying to rebut them both.

Crickets still chirping... (Updated)

Over a year ago, in the combox of a post on another topic, a reader asked for my opinion of Stephen Law’s “evil-god challenge” to theism.  In the same combox, I dashed off some brief remarks in response.  To my surprise, Law called attention to my off-the-cuff remarks over at his own blog, and offered a testy response in my combox.  He suggested that I read his article on the subject and told his own readers: “I have rattled [Feser’s] cage with a comment… Wonder if he'll respond?”

Well, I did read his article and I did respond both to the article and to his combox remarks, non-polemically and in detail.   Over a year later, I am still waiting for Law’s reply – a reply he said he would write.  Wonder if he’ll ever get to it?

Pop culture roundup

Two or three of my readers have expressed interest in my posts on movies, popular music, and pop culture in general.  And I’ll bet at least twice that many are interested.  So, for you fans of pretentious pop culture analysis, here’s a roundup of relevant posts and articles.  For the most part I’ve included only those that are fairly substantive.

A final word on Eric MacDonald

That Eric MacDonald’s criticisms of my book The Last Superstition are devoid of any merit whatsoever is clear from the evidence adduced in the two posts I have devoted to him already (here and here).  If there is any lingering doubt, the present post will dispel it.  A slightly chastened MacDonald has now himself admitted (in what he says will be his final word on my book) that he “was not comfortable with [the] conclusions” he had drawn after his first attempt to deal with the substance of my arguments, that he has “misunderstood” at least some of those arguments, and that his contemptible Himmler comparison “was perhaps over the top.”  Yet he commends to us his final feeble effort to respond to my arguments, still appears to cling to for the most part to his earlier criticisms, and retracts none of the nastiness he has relentlessly directed towards me personally.  (To be sure, he thinks this nastiness is justified by the polemical tone of my book and by my aggressive response to his nastiness.  It is not, for reasons I will get to presently.) 

Are you for real?

In a recent post, I gave as an example of an obviously wrongheaded conception of God’s relationship to the world the idea that we are literally fictional characters in a story He has authored – though I also allowed that as a mere analogy the idea may have its uses.  Vincent Torley wonders whether there might not be something more to the idea, though, citing the use Hugh McCann makes of it in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Divine Providence” (see especially section 6 of the article).

Reply to Torley and Cudworth

This is the second installment of a two-part post on the dispute between Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and “Intelligent Design” (ID) theory (a post which I hope will put the subject to rest for a while).  Having in my previous installment set out the Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art” (or natural objects and artifacts), I now turn to consider the recent remarks of ID defenders Vincent Torley and Thomas Cudworth over at the blog Uncommon Descent.  (Those who haven’t read the previous installment are urged to do so before reading this one.  It also wouldn’t hurt if you had some familiarity with the other things I’ve said on this topic in many previous posts.)

The God above God

I’m not a big fan of Paul Tillich.  As a philosopher, he was too muddleheaded; as a theologian, too modernist.  But even muddleheaded modernists get a genuine insight now and again.  Tillich arguably did when he spoke of “the God above God,” though he presented it poorly and with an admixture of serious error.

A further thought on the “one god further” objection

We’ve been beating up on the “one god further” objection to theism.  Here’s another way to look at the problem with it.  The objection, you’ll recall, goes like this:

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Suppose I go along with the gag.  Why do I dismiss all other gods?
 

Well, in part because there is ample reason to think they do not exist.  But also – and far more importantly – because even if they did exist, they would all in various respects be less than ultimate and thus would not be truly divine and worthy of worship.  So, for example, if the gods of Olympus existed, we would expect to find them living atop Mount Olympus, and they don’t.  But even if they did exist – suppose they return to Olympus when no one is looking, or reside in some other dimension as in the Marvel Comics version of the Olympian gods – they would all in various respects manifest limitations and defects that show them to be mere creatures like us, even if more grand creatures than we are.  Hence, as we know from mythology, they are all supposed to suffer myriad limitations on their power, and to be motivated by various petty concerns.  They come into existence, just as we do.  They can be startled when the face of the guy they’re about to kiss comes peeling off to reveal a leering skull.  (Just check out Aphrodite – also known as Venus – on that comic book cover up above!  You’d think the skeleton hands would have been a clue that something was up with this dude…)

The “one god further” objection

A reader calls attention to Bill Vallicella’s reply to what might be called the “one god further” objection to theism.  Bill sums up the objection as follows:

The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

Or as the Common Sense Atheism blog used to proclaim proudly on its masthead:

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I see that that blog has now removed this one-liner, which is perhaps a sign that intellectual progress is possible even among New Atheist types.  Because while your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins.

Catholicism, conservatism, and capital punishment

Catholic teaching on the death penalty – or rather, yet another simplistic and misleading presentation of the Church’s teaching – is in the news again.  I plan to write up a blog post on this latest controversy, but in the meantime I thought it would be worthwhile reprinting the lengthy treatment of the subject I wrote for the old Right Reason group blog back in 2005.  (The original post and the combox discussion it generated can still be found here via the Wayback Machine.  But Wayback Machine links are temperamental, so it will be useful to give the post a new home.)

Unhinged Dissent

Over at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley is not happy with my recent post on Aquinas and Paley.  He had originally given his critique the inflammatory title “Heresy hunter!” – complete with exclamation point, and my picture alongside that of an Inquisitor and his crew “getting medieval” on some guy (William Dembski, I suppose).  This rather left the impression that if you criticize ID on theological grounds, you are akin to Torquemada – which is, needless to say, a little over the top.

Thomism versus the design argument

Defenders of “Intelligent Design” theory sometimes accuse their Thomist critics of overstating the differences between Aquinas and William Paley.  As we have seen before, their use of Aquinas’s texts is highly dubious.  Passages are ripped from context and the general metaphysical assumptions that inform Aquinas’s thinking, and which would rule out the readings the ID theorist would like to give the texts, are ignored.  This is not surprising given the ad hoc character of so much ID argumentation.  More surprising is Marie George’s strange article about me in the most recent issue of Philosophia Christi.  George, like me, is both an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosopher and a critic of ID.  Yet she too objects to my dissociating Aquinas’s Fifth Way from Paley’s design argument.  Why?

Razor Boy

Will you still have a song to sing
When the razor boy comes
And takes your fancy things away?

Steely Dan, “Razor Boy”

If Descartes was the father of modern philosophy, the medieval philosopher William of Ockham was the great grandfather.  Superficial histories of thought would attribute this meta-paternity to the so-called “Ockham’s razor” principle.  But there was nothing distinctively Ockhamite about that, and nothing terribly revolutionary in it either.  On the one hand, the basic idea is as old as Aristotle and can be found in various medieval authors.  On the other hand, the specific formulation usually associated with Ockham – “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity” – first appears centuries after Ockham’s time, and the label “Ockham’s Razor” appears only in the nineteenth century.  (See William Thorburn’s article “The Myth of Ockham’s Razor”)  And while the old Razor Boy did cut away the foundations of medieval thought, it was not (contrary to what Christopher Hitchens thinks) on the basis of some kind of proto-scientific rationalism, but rather in the name of an anti-rationalist authoritarian theology.

Can we make sense of the world?

Is reality intelligible?  Can we make sense of it?  Or is the world at bottom an unintelligible “brute fact” with no explanation?  We can tighten up these questions by distinguishing several senses in which the world might be said to be (or not to be) intelligible.  To make these distinctions is to see that the questions are not susceptible of a simple Yes or No answer.  There are in fact a number of positions one could take on the question of the world’s intelligibility – though they are by no means all equally plausible.

The brutal facts about Keith Parsons

At The Secular Outpost, Keith Parsons comments on all the commentary about him.  (HT: Bill Vallicella)  If you check out his combox, you’ll see that he there accuses me of “Parsons-bashing.”  I think a fair-minded reader of my recent post about him would agree that I wasn’t really criticizing him so much as those who’ve made a big deal out of his “calling it quits” on philosophy of religion.  All the same, I did have a few good-natured yucks at his expense, so I don’t blame him for being a little sore at me.

I do blame him, though, for providing further evidence that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as he does in another one of his comments.  So, this time let’s really do a little Parsons-bashing, shall we?

Unbroken and the problem of evil

I recently finished Laura Hillenbrand’s terrific new book Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, 1936 Olympian and prisoner of war under the Japanese during WWII. I was compelled to buy a copy after reading an absolutely gripping excerpt in Vanity Fair, which described the harrowing 46 days Zamperini and his fellow airman Russell Phillips spent adrift at sea after their plane went down in the Pacific and before they were picked up by the Japanese. You can read it yourself here. After doing so you might think that a human being could endure no greater suffering than Zamperini and Phillips did as castaways. You would be wrong, as the rest of the book makes clear.

Putting the Cross back into Christmas

It is difficult to be a human being. Illness, injury, death, bereavement, depression, frustrated hopes, unfulfilled dreams, unrequited love, despair, humiliation, hunger, nakedness, want of every kind – the usual illustrations of the problem of evil provide ample evidence of this. The point applies no less to those relatively untouched by such misfortunes. For they are more prone than their fellows to become complacent, superficial, ungrateful, and selfish – an even graver misfortune, and one that tends to lead us into the lesser ones after all. But every human being has his own distinctive moral weaknesses. It is difficult to be a human being because it is difficult to be a good human being – a human being who flourishes, who fulfills the various ends nature has set for us, whether they be our animal ends or our higher, rational and moral ends.

Causal loops, infinite regresses, and information

On a reader’s recommendation, the wife and I took in the 2007 Spanish science fiction movie Timecrimes last weekend. Great flick. It’s a time travel story similar in structure to Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (which I discussed in a recent post), though the plot is very different. Hector, the movie’s protagonist, spies through his binoculars a woman removing her shirt in the woods beyond his house. After going out to investigate, he comes upon the woman lying naked and motionless, and is then suddenly stabbed in the arm by an attacker whose head is wrapped in bloody bandages. (Since this is a family blog of sorts, I suppose I should alert the unwary viewer lest he be temporarily blinded by the rather bright pair of headlights that appears onscreen a couple of times, and I don’t mean the ones on Hector’s car. Good thing my wife was there to shield my eyes!)

Plantinga’s ontological argument

Alvin Plantinga famously defends a version of the ontological argument that makes use of the notion of possible worlds. As is typically done, we might think of a “possible world” as a complete way that things might have been. In the actual world I am writing up this blog post, but I could have decided instead to go pour myself a Scotch. (Since it’s still morning, I won’t – I can wait an hour.) So, we might say that there is a possible world more or less like the actual world – Obama is still president, I still teach and write philosophy, and so forth – except that instead of writing up this blog post at this particular moment, I am pouring myself a Scotch. (Naturally there will be some other differences that follow from this one.) We can imagine possible worlds that are even more different or less different in various ways – a possible world where the Allies lost World War II, a possible world in which human beings never existed, a possible world exactly like the actual one except that the book next to me sits a millimeter farther to the right than it actually does, and so forth. Not everything is a possible world, though. There is no possible world where 2 + 2 = 5 or in which squares are round.